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Building International Connections

A colleague and I are developing a presentation for the NAIS Annual Conference (March 2, 2007) about inexpensive ways to connect students between different schools and different countries. So far, we’re thinking of showing several different scenarios (perhaps five different departments) over a 3-5 year period for beginning and developing inexpensive international collaborations.

To begin, one thing we’re looking for are sites that help teachers connect with teachers internationally. I used one many years ago to do a simple email exchange between three classes in three different schools, and I’m hoping we can find some worthwhile “interconnection” sites for the start of the process. We have started from connections that our teachers already had, but it would nice to have a well to go to.

So far, I have the following leads:

The Intercultural E-Mail Classroom Connections: this is the site I used in the early nineties to connect my Washington, DC students with two classrooms in other states.

The Classroom Connection Program links Social Studies and Language Arts classroom internationally.

The ePals Global Network claims to have the largest community of classrooms collaborating with each other.

The Wisconsin Department of Education has a nice site with a collection of sources for teachers who wish to build international connections, with links to CEARCH, KidLink, and the Peace Corps Worldwise Schools.

If you have used any of these sites for building international connections, or have other resources to recommend, please let me know about your experiences either through a comment to this post or via email.